Politics in a Vacuum

Jordan Deam explores CCP's and EVE Online's groundbreaking Council of Stellar Management with an inside look at the Council's first annual CSM Summit in Iceland.

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I've been dying to read about that conference ever since I first read about it. That was fascinating.

Game developers and players engaged in politics? Social scientists should flock to this occurance. Hell, I should flock to this occurance. This is amazingly interesting, mostly because I would assume most parties involved have absolutely no knowledge of politics.

This would be border-edge to one of those "perfect" scenarios many social scientists are attracted to, wherein they actually get to witness the formation of society from a state of nature. Throw in the very odd consumer vs provider interaction, a democratic process based upon complex politics and a historically hierarchical clan-based structure and my intellectual juices (shhh) start bubbling. Kudos on the research, a very good article.

Very very interesting.

I tried to enjoy EVE but I grew tired of the lack of storyline support, the whole military industrial complex (all this technology and all we can use it for is to kill each other), Goons trying to break the game and make everyone miserable, and all that dead time training skills.

Trying to break the game (suicide ganking) is part of the game.

Of course, so is making reasonable consequences for such action.

For what it's worth, the proposed change (it will only take effect in a few months) is to insurance payouts. In other words, if you lose a ship to police action in response to your unprovoked attack on another ship in high security space, the insurance policy will no longer pay out. There's been a lot of complaints about it, but it's a fairly logical change. I don't expect an insurance policy that covers fire to pay me if I commit arson.

Nice article.

dukeh016:
I find EVE fascinating to read about in general because of the unique structure of it. Far more than Second Life EVE seems to be a cultural playground/experiment.

Narcogen/MorkFromOrk:
Maybe one should say that breaking the game is part of any competitive game. Games set an amount of rules, to gain the maximum amountof power within those rules you try and find the very limits of them. This automatically leads to people finding gaps in the rules that allow new levels of power to be reached, expanding the limits.

Aside:
Banning certain behaviour is a very dangerous thing to do as later something may be found that is far more powerful than that which you banned before making the old tactic irrelevant and perhaps even something you'd consider allowing back on to rebalance. This creates a strain upon the individuals artificially setting the rules to try and balance the system instead of letting the rules mature to their 'natural' balance through organic means.

This suicide ganking seems to bring an unfair advantage to groups against singles, but the community could have set up a social control structure about it on their own without having to resort to code having to be changed.

Awesome nick btw Mork

Hardin/Cruse posts on another forum where I frequent. Let me tell you now: He knows the world of EVE like the back of his hand. I mean, really: He wrote a document the size of a very large book detailing the wars and conflict in space, and what went wrong for both CCP, the game design and the alliances respectively. When he put himself up for election on the board, he launched a full-scale, intergalactic campaign to win; something which he heartily pulled off.

Its funny, really: EVE seems to take everything to the next level; from the community to their interaction with the management. In other games, GMs are seen as nigh on Godly figures when they appear in-game, but in EVE it is expected that they get involved in the game and the community; although obviously not abusing their powers to do so. Theoretically, of course, these meetings would have not have needed to take place, for the GMs should know their game from all prospectives if they play and observe. Still, as with all things, it is open to human fallacy, which does little more than to present even greater, intriguing opportunities for interaction between developers and the customers - even if it is basically a glorified popularity contest.

And now if they ever get arrround to making the game fun for people not in a huge clan as well. ffa pvp is NOT FUN if you start out right next to somebody who can vaporize you without even looking.

This is what happened to cnc3 too: ea invited several players to help develop the game. The result: A game exclusively catered to those players, the competitive top 10. And everybody who didn't like spamming light tanks got shafted.

Very good article, but I think the second day was much more interesting and both sides of the process came together a lot more.